So that’s why we can’t swat flies

Ionce met someone who was so colour blind they thought my magenta hair was the same colour as everyone else’s. It was a good reminder that we don’t all perceive the world the same way. Closer to home, my daughter has an incredible sense of taste and smell. On a number of occasions we’ve walked into a restaurant and had to walk straight back out again because she’s found the smell so overwhelming.

A few days ago I went to an incredible talk by Samantha Carouso-peck, a PHD student at Cornell University in the United States.

She showed us a video of the courtship display of the black manakin, a little bird that lives in South America. While other manakins are known for their elaborate courtship displays (look them up, they even moonwalk), the black manakins just seem to sit on a branch and make little hops.

Or at least that’s what they look like to us. When filmed with a high-speed camera and played back in slow motion, those little hops are the most incredible full back somersaults, each lasting 0.37 seconds and completely invisible to the human eye.

We are also completely blind to how cordon bleu finches tap-dance for each other. Again, all we humans can see is a simple little hop.

Carouso-peck and her supervisor Associate Professor Michael Goldstein are using high-speed cameras to investigate how male zebra finches learn to sing in an effort to understand more about how babies learn to talk.

For a long time, scientists thought zebra finches learned purely by imitating adult males. Carouso-peck and Goldstein’s slow-motion videos have revealed that when female zebra finches hear a song they like they very briefly fluff up their feathers. Young males learn to sing better songs by watching out for these ‘‘fluff-ups’’.

Watching the little black manakin somersaulting and the finches tap-dancing has made me wonder how much of what’s going on around us we humans miss completely.

But learning that many creatures experience time differently to us also explains why it’s often hard to swat a fly.

We think we’re fast, but to them we’re moving in slow motion.